Taking Stock

My husband says the purpose of marriage is to cancel each other out.

I know what he's going to say, that I'm quoting him out of context. But was he ever in context? We were out on the back deck having cocktails between the tiki torches when he offered up this maxim.

Here's what I think about marriage. It's like that Gary Larson joke where the people go on and on talking to their dog, and all the dog hears is her name interspersed amidst a whole lot of white noise.

We only hear what we want to hear, what grabs our attention. Let me tell you, this grabbed mine. I'm still trying to figure out what my husband meant. Raise your hand if you think you know.

I'm not saying this was the reason I started cheating at Free Cell. But it was soon after the evening on the deck that I figured out how to extricate myself from a losing game without sacrificing my score, my computer none the wiser, and was well on my way to doubling my all-time record of 259 wins in a row, when I was forced to take stock.

Cheating at solitaire seems indicative of a possible personality flaw. Do you think?

Once when I was a kid I made my little sister throw a rock at me, then ran crying to our dad so he'd give her a spanking. When he found out what I'd done, he spanked me, too. I guess you could say the two acts canceled each other out.

I did the rock thing to get some attention. Being the middle of three girls is like living in parentheses. Like that Gary Larson dog, my parents only heard me when I cried.

pa-ren-the-sis - noun, plural - ses 1. A qualifying or explanatory word, phrase or clause that interrupts a syntactic construction without otherwise affecting it.

The rock thing also seems pretty much indicative of a possible personality flaw.

But back to my point. How do you know when a mere adage becomes a maxim? And is the ultimate maxim a maximum? For instance, the Golden Rule? And who thought up that one? And were they married?

I just took a break and played a few dozen games of Free Cell. I'm back on the Brownie Promise, my winning streak has come to an abrupt end. Just now I was working on a mere seventeen wins in a row when, out of the blue, my husband emails me a copy of a letter he sent to a friend twenty-five (gasp!!) years ago. In the letter he describes this woman he's fallen head-over-heels for, Yours Truly. Here's an excerpt:

"...this woman and I lived in the same house (me on the first floor, she on the third) for a year and a half without exchanging more than the most cursory of passing smalltalk on the steps or out in the yard. I might have written to you once where I mentioned a rather spooky but intriguing woman musician who lived upstairs and who I never really talked to because she always seemed in a hurry and on drugs or something..."

Ah, the good old days.

I just took another break and went for a run down by the Lake with my husband. A brief passing thundershower caught us on our way out. On our return we were treated to an enormous double rainbow stretching across the water from one shore to the other, one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments. It hovered in the heavens for maybe twenty minutes before slowly fading, like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Maybe it was a sign. Reminding us who we once were, before familiarity bred cancellation. Or maybe it was a reward for, I don't know, being good. Not cheating. One way or the other, we'd never have seen it if we hadn't been down there together, still running after twenty-five years. Which is not the same as being in a hurry.